Free Republic

Eve Ensler, the author of the much talked about Vagina Monologue , has declared Mumbai to be a 'vagina city', and now Alyque Padamsee wants people to hear the other side. "I loved Vagina Monologues but, I thought it was too one sided, with disparaging comments about the male organ and men. Men just didn't get to say anything in that play," says Padamsee. As a 'homage' to the cult play, the advertising and theatre guru is busy with directing Penis Dialogues . Laced with humour, the play talks about the organ as an instrument of procreation, recreating and urination....

A towering new mosque soon to join the Boston skyline has the secret endorsement of a radical, anti-Western cleric who preaches Muslims will one day ``conquer'' the United States. The endorsement of the $22 million mosque and cultural center project in Roxbury by the cleric, Dr. Yusuf Abdullah al-Qaradawi, appears prominently in an Arabic-language brochure published last year by the Islamic Society of Boston, which is the group Mayor Thomas M. Menino has approved to construct the mosque. Al-Qaradawi's enthusiastic backing of the project is nowhere to be found in the group's English-language brochure. After the backers of the mosque...

ISTANBUL MY FATHER, Dr. Mujaddid Ahmed Ijaz, was an early pioneer in Pakistan's "Atoms for Peace" cooperative nuclear program with the US during the late 1960s. One of the most vivid memories I have of him was the stream of tears flowing down his cheeks as our Pakistan International Airlines Boeing 707 took off from Karachi Airport in the winter of 1972. It would be our last visit to Pakistan as children. I returned to Islamabad in the summer of 1992, the year my father died, to receive the condolences of his colleagues, former students, and friends at Pakistan's key...

NEW DELHI - While all attention is focused on Osama bin Laden and his cohorts allegedly cornered in western Pakistan, in India there is an equal amount of interest in the one man who is wanted just as desperately - Dawood Ibrahim. Reports quoting intelligence sources and independently confirmed by home ministry officials say that India's most wanted criminal - thought to be hiding in Pakistan - is facing the heat at the instance of none less than Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf. The reports say that Dawood's personal security guards, derived from the cream of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI)...

News of the Absurd A 29-year old woman working for UK's GCHQ - the British equivalent of the US NSA was discharged in court after the British government said it would not offer evidence against her for leaking government secrets. The Mandarin translator leaked news that US intelligence had asked the British to step up eavesdropping of embassies from countries that were key to a UN Iraq resolution. She said she had only followed her conscience: she wanted to expose attempts by the US to subvert GCHQ and also to save civilian Iraqi lives. We thought if one worked for...

A woman looks at the specimen of a huge pig in Shenyang, capital of northeast China's Liaoning Province on Wednesday, February 25, 2004. The pig, which died on February 5, 2004, had a weight of 900 kilograms, setting a record in China.

"Today, in The Hague, you will sit in judgment. Today, I will bury my husband, my heart has been cut in two. I am not a politician. I am appealing to you as someone who has lost her husband, a woman whose heart has been silenced - and a woman whose tragedy the separation fence could have prevented. I was married to Yehuda for 21 years. He was the love of my youth, since I was 15. Yehuda's sister is the wife of Israel's Economic Attache in The Hague and works in the Embassy there. For months, she, her husband...

WANA/ ISLAMABAD: Pakistani security agencies Tuesday arrested at least 20 terrorists including some foreigners from Wana in South Waziristan during an operation against al-Qaeda and Taliban operatives hiding in the Afghan-bordering tribal belt, recovering huge quantity of ammunition besides seizing a large number of passports from their possessions. However, the identity of the foreigners arrested during the operation remained unknown till the last reports came in. Also, people from both the sides remained unscathed during the crackdown. Some reports suggested the foreigners hailed from Arab States, Chechnya and Uzbekistan. Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) Director General Major-General Shaukat Sultan informing the...

KARACHI - A massive land and air military operation on either side of the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan is now under way, with the main goals of catching leading commanders of the Afghan resistance, as well as Osama bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Omar. The focal point of the operation at this point is the tribal areas of North and South Waziristan on the Pakistani side, and Paktia and Paktika in Afghanistan. On Sunday, Pakistani Interior Minister Faisal Saleh Hayat confirmed that Pakistani paramilitary troops had been deployed in these tribal areas. In the coming weeks, the operation...

NEW DELHI – As the principal of an Islamic seminary in New Delhi, Maulvi Mohammad Mouzzam Ahmed knows there is no such thing as a free lunch. So when he was offered an all-expenses-paid trip to the United States a few months ago, to see how religious schools operate there, he was curious, and a little skeptical. What, he wondered, would the world's greatest superpower want with a nice moderate Muslim like him? The maulvi was not alone. He was just one of a half-dozen Indian Muslim clerics invited to the United States in September as part of the US...

Nine nuclear scientists have abandoned their jobs in Pakistan and secretly taken up jobs in foreign countries where the pay and working conditions are better, Pakistani exiles have told rediff.com The scientists are all engineers who were previously employed at the Chashma nuclear power plant built with Chinese help in central Pakistan. Their exodus represents the frustration experienced by the nuclear community as a whole that has come to a head following revelations about the emperor-like lifestyle of Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb. Khan's luxury lifestyle included 24-hour access to a Pakistan Air Force transport...

NEW YORK - (KRT) - A prominent Yemeni cleric is suspected of raising money for terrorists at a Muslim charity and several mosques in Brooklyn, it was disclosed yesterday. An FBI agent pulled back the veil on a secret investigation of Sheikh Abdullah Satar at the trial of an associate who is charged with lying about the cleric's activities. The agent, Brian Murphy, said in Brooklyn Federal Court that Satar was under surveillance during a fund-raising swing through Brooklyn in early 2000. At the time, the feds were conducting an investigation into the financing of terrorist groups. After Satar -...

FEB 8 2004 Before we go into this story, readers need some background. Everything below is only what we have heard and no reader should assume that we have some special source. Nonetheless, readers will see that a lot of quite puzzling behavior on Washington and the Khan Affair, and very puzzling behavior on Washington's straight-faced insistence that President Musharraf is cooperating fully on N-proliferation, will now start making sense. Once America decided to go after Bin Laden in Afghanistan, it asked for and thought it was given assurances of Pakistani cooperation. When Washington found out that the Pakistanis were...

God does not take sides. Everyone, in God's realm is rewarded or punished according to his or her deeds. Criminals burn in hell and those who respect and honor God's will are rewarded by a place in paradise. Torture, pain and sufferings are reserved for the sinners only. Innocents do not suffer any loss of dignity ever. But His vicegerent in this earth has proved to be incapable of being impartial. Absolute Power corrupts him absolutely. He becomes a tyrant. And the life under his autocratic rule becomes hell for the weaker and the poor. Democratic order provides a mechanism...

JAMMU, Jan 27: Three civilians, two of them women, and an Army jawan were killed and another jawan was injured in the separate militancy related incidents in the Jammu region since last evening. Army also rescued a boy kidnapped by the militants and destroyed a hideout in Gool. Official sources said a group of militants opened firing on a joint patrol party of police and security forces at village Malhan in Surankote tehsil of Poonch district late last night. The firing was replied by the security personnel. In the heavy exchange of firing, an Army jawan was injured while a...

Muslims, according to Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) are angry with President George W. Bush and want to defeat him in the coming elections. CAIR says that many American Muslims will vote for ABB - anybody but Bush. He, according to the Wahhabi and Saudi supported groups has betrayed them. In 2000, Muslims endorsed George W. Bush for president, citing his outreach to the Muslim community and his pledge to end the use of so-called secret evidence in immigration deportation hearings. He, according to Islamists, had also promised to address Muslim concerns on domestic and foreign policy issues but...

Bangladesh police have held 24 people for questioning following a bomb attack on a shrine in the city of Sylhet on Monday that killed three people. The bomb, which injured around 30, went off during a festival at the shrine of Muslim saint Hazrat Shah Jalal. A 14-year-old boy and an unidentified man died instantly and another man died later in hospital. Shrine officials said up to 50,000 devotees had gathered for the three-day Urs Sharif festival. Police said the explosion was the first act of violence at the 700-year-old shrine in Sylhet, 192 kilometres (120 miles) north-east of the...

SRINAGAR, Jan 11: Even as militants have mercilessly killed a couple in Tral and a cable operator in Rajpora area of Pulwama district, security forces have killed two militants in a fierce gunbattle in Bijbehara area of south Kashmir since last evening. Meanwhile, security forces have killed two more militants in the encounter that had begun at Bakhipora in Rafiabad area of Baramulla district on Friday. Informed sources in south Kashmir told the EXCELSIOR that late last evening, a group of heavily armed militants barged into the house of a small time photographer Farooq Ahmed Mirza S/o Gul Shah at...

India says it is planning to deport an estimated 20 million Bangladeshi illegal immigrants. The Home Ministry in Delhi said the illegal immigrant issue had to be tackled with ''utmost urgency''. In a statement issued after a day-long security meeting of top Indian officials, the ministry said: ''The presence of a large number of illegal foreign immigrants, particularly from Bangladesh, poses a serious threat to internal security.'' However, the Bangladeshi authorities have dismissed the Indian statement as "absurd. " A Foreign Office spokesman in Dhaka said no Bangladeshis were in India illegally. More than half the estimated Bangladeshi immigrants in...